Ancient history is coming to the surface in Fort McMurray, Alta., where modern mechanical giants meet the prehistoric kind.

Last week, a Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil patch worker at the controls of an enormous shovelling machine unearthed what could prove to be a paleontological treasure.

The remains of a rare reptile that prowled Alberta's prehistoric seas are now being excavated by scientists who hope to learn something about life in the province more than 100 million years ago.

"There's nothing around like it today," said Don Brinkman, director of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. At up to 20 metres long, the long-necked plesiosaur was one of the largest to swim in the ocean that once covered most of the province. Read More...

The Friends of Science submission on the Government of Canada’s CO2 reduction plan, which we featured a couple of weeks back, contains - among the usual lies, misconceptions, zombie arguments and irrelevancies - this statement on the effects of sea-level rise on atoll islands (Page 15):

“The islands are mostly comprised of coral debris eroded from encircling reefs that is pushed up onto the islands by winds and waves. As the sea level rises, more sand and coral debris accumulates on the islands with the result that the islands rise with the sea level. The coral itself continues to grow upwards to match the sea level rise. Island atolls can grow much faster than recent rates of sea level rise. Sea level rise does not endanger low-lying coral islands.”

In support of this model of atoll island evolution they cited recent work by Webb & Kench, who found that of 27 islands on four different atolls they examined in air photos and satellite images covering periods of 19 to 61 years, only four had decreased in area while 11 had increased and the rest had experienced no significant change either way. This is an interesting result, but to see if it really does support our Friends’ contention (or even Webb & Kench’s own more cautious conclusion that it “suggests that reef islands are geomorphically resilient landforms") we need to look more closely at the origin and construction of atoll islands and their histories over a longer timescale. Read More...

The Earth is characterized by a significant population of creationist, despite the overwhelming evidence consistentwith evolution. Some creationistic thought is attributable to straight out ignorance; some to religious fervor; and some, no doubt, to people who know evolution to be correct but who would never be caught publicly admitting to such knowledge. Regardless of why they are creationist, creationists all have one thing in common: they are forced to ignore overwhelming evidence consistentwith evolution. For most creationist this ignorance takes the form of simply not talking about or accepting the data that are best interpreted in terms of evolution. Others, more aggressively, will deny the data. A small minority have gone so far as to fabricate fraudulent data as a means of trying to bring down an idea that they simply know in the hearts to be wrong. Read More...

"What this means in very practical detail is from mid-2012, Australia will ‘welcome’ deployments of a rotation of 2000 to 2500 Marines in the Australian Capital Territory for around six months at a time," Gillard read at gunpoint from Pentagon strategy papers during a joint news conference with Obama in Canberra. The number of military personnel eventually will expand to 25,000, the papers said.

"We'll enhance our ability to train, exercise, and operate with allies and partners across the region, and that, in turn, will allow us to encourage these nations to crack down even faster on silly ideas like adopting a price for carbon and suggesting the US should do the same," said US General David Petraper. Read More...

A prominent climate change skeptic told Congress on Monday he no longer doubts that global warming is real and caused by humans, and joined other scientists in urging action to stop it.

Physicist Richard Muller, director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, whose two-year research was funded in part by a foundation formed by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, said he could find no bias in other studies. Read More...

Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released the findings of its extensive study on global land temperatures over the past century. Physics professor Richard Muller, who led the study, heralded the findings with a number of controversial statements in the press, including an op-ed in this newspaper titled "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism." And yet Mr. Muller remains a true skepticóa searcher for scientific truth. I congratulate Mr. Muller and his Berkeley Earth team for undertaking this difficult task in the realm of climate.

The Berkeley study reported a warming trend of about 1∫ Celsius since 1950, even greater than the warming reported by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I disagree with this result, which perhaps makes me a little more of a skeptic than Mr. Muller. Read More...

Dr. Schweinsgruber says: Dr. Marshall is not only debating Dr. Clark, but also all 39 Friends of Science, which will constitute the whole crowd, as well as the moderator Dr. Bratt, professor of climatology political sciences. If Dr. Marshall wins the debate, CO2 causes serious global warming. If Dr. Clark wins the debate, CO2 does not cause serious global warming - independent of what the broad body of published science says. Both opponents will be supported by a group praying the rosary. The group that prays the most rosaries will support their candidate more so that that candidate will win. Next week, the whole scenario will be repeated, but the discussion will centre around the question: does stupidity hurt?